Fiction: Scrambled Eggs(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“Good morning, Sleepyhead! How did you sleep?”
    “I slept well. Very well! What are you doing up so early?”
    “Fixing you breakfast. I was gonna serve it to you in bed.”
    “A heavenly aroma of bacon awakened me, and rather rudely, I must say, as I had been in Tahiti, worried that the gray old boards would send splinters into my heels and ruin our honeymoon.”
    “Wow. I’m sorry I woke you. That’s a great dream. We’ll get there one of these days.”
    “Don’t apologize, Baby. Any bacon day is a honeymoon.”
    “The noise from scrambling the eggs with the fork in the Pyrex would have woken you up, anyway.”
    He was annoyed that she had said she’d slept well, where he would have said good, while knowing well the proper word. Even now in middle age, he doubted his ability to use awakened right. Or correctly.
    He grew up in Tennessee.
    She came south from Michigan.
    “I should have started with the coffee,” he confessed.
    “I’m on it,” she answered, checking the carafe for cleanliness and going up on tiptoe to pull the coffee from the cabinet just above the coffeemaker, just as if she’d been here before. “On it like Bluebonnet,” she sang, and flashed that sweetest of mischievous smiles that had made him abandon every principle and propose to her.
    “How do you feel about grits?”
    “I’ve never tried them. Is that what we’ll have?”
    “If you want. They don’t taste like anything, really, though they’re ground corn. It’s what you add to them that makes them. I can add cheese.”
    “What kind of cheese?”
    “Or garlic or Tabasco or Valentina or.”
    “I’ve never had them. How do you like them best? Teach me.”
    “I like them simple, with plenty of butter and salt and way more black pepper than you think you need.”
    “Oh, me, too! That sounds wonderful. We don’t need any cheese. What kind of cheese do you have?”
    “I know there’s grape, of course. For the toast, I mean! I was already thinking ahead to the toast, for one cannot enjoy grits to their maximum capacity for fulfillment of pleasure without toast.”
    He opened the refrigerator and extracted and inspected a partial tiny block of Swiss, which appeared free of blue or green, and a nearly full bag of shredded cheddar he knew was too new for corruption, and kept looking around but not finding the slices of Havarti he couldn’t recall finishing. He noted three or four cans of beer and some plum jelly.
    “We don’t need cheese. We have our whole lives ahead of us to explore the adventures of fixin’ grits.”
    He noted the slight mockery in her use of the Southernism and called her on it, but she laughed, claiming, “No, I like the quaintness. I’m going to adopt that usage and make it my own and find new and wildly sophisticated and shocking ways to deploy it.”
    “My baby! My charming new bride!”
    “Never ask me what I’m fixin’ to do. Have you started those grits? No. There is only bacon in the cast iron.”
    “No, I was just fixin’ to fix them, trying to figger out which pot to use, coz I likes me a ton o’ grits. When I finish one serving, I want another, but I don’t know about you, coz I know a lotta folks don’t care for ’em, really.”
    “What can I do to help, darling hubby?”
    “Just don’t ever call me hubby.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry! Do you prefer Master or Lord and Master?”
    They laughed, squeezed each other.
    “What can I do to help?” she repeated.
    “May you. What may you. The coffee is going.”
    “What next? The toast? The eggs? I see the spatulas and the wooden spoons, et al., but which is the silverware drawer? Shall I pull the eggs? How many do you think we’ll need?”
    “My Lord.”
    “My Sweet Lord.”
    “You can pull the—you MAY pull the butter”—he laughed—“for the toast.”
    “So, some for the toast, and some for the eggs, and lots for the grits. I hope we’ve got plenty of butter!”
    “We’ve got plenty,” he said, feeling sudden panic. “Check the box.”
    She found a last stick in the cardboard package and almost half a stick on the slim plastic dish in the plastic-covered dairy compartment.
    “I’ll use bacon grease for the eggs,” he told her, feeling relief.
    “I love toast best of all! What kinds of bread do we have?”
    “Some I made will be best for the toast. It’s about three or four days old, already. Still good, though. I promise!”
    “Oh, baby! You made it yourself? How’d I ever get so lucky?”
    “Oh, don’t get excited. It’s rare I can make a successful loaf. I used to have the touch when I was a kid, but now I fail much more often than I succeed. I make killer yeast rolls, though. And cookies.”
    “Cookies! Turns out I did get lucky, after all!”
    “Scrambled all right with you?”
    “Scrambled’s my fave!”
    “Mine, too. Hard to go wrong there. Well, but it is hard to get the temp right.”
    “Except for the Benedict. Those are my real favorites, but who makes those? Too much of a pain in the ass.”
    “Yeah. I still haven’t tried to make those.”
    “You go to a Sunday brunch for those. With champagne. Peach bellinis. Yum!”
    “Now I want Eggs Benedict, damnit.”
    He embraced her again, a bit of sleep smell clinging to her and mingling with coffee and bacon aromas, and of a sudden wondered if a quickie might be possible or practical, when she asked:
    “Who keeps Canadian bacon on hand? Nobody, that’s who!”
    He hugged her again for the Holden Caulfield.
    “But how many eggs? What’s your hunger level? Mine’s like this,” spinning round and around, as if that defined it, and he found it did.
    “You said something about bacon grease.”
    “Yeah, I knew we wanted a ton of bacon, so that made a ton of bacon fat.”
    “But we cook eggs in butter.”
    “You haven’t tried them in bacon fat?”
    “That’s ridiculous!”
    “It’s liquid gold!”
    “Well, you can scramble yours in pigfat, and I’ll cook my own in butter. Do you have another skillet?”
    “Well, okay, if you wish, but...liquid gold.”
    She actually scowled now and turned, theatrically, her back on him to set down coffee cups with unnecessary force on the counter and pour coffee before asking if he had half & half or preferred pigfat for coffee, too.
    He laughed before he saw she wasn’t joking. The laugh made things worse. How did this happen? They had so much fun only moments ago. He considered asking if he’d mentioned his mastery of the cookie and decided at once against it. He’d best not look into her face for a while, so he thanked her for the coffee and fished a couple of forks from a drawer and began to crack eggs into the big blue ceramic bowl, in his family for ages.
    Mastery of the cookie caused a snort of laughter, as it reminded him of Should I call you Master or Lord, so he knew mentioning it again was the absolute worst thing he could have done, as it had lost all the delight it had held in the past and would incite rage now, and somehow all of that made him laugh, almost to himself, and from a corner of his side-eye, he saw her wanting to ask what was so funny, and it was his turn not to answer the unasked.
    After he’d emptied each shell, he dug a finger around each half to get every drop of white, and then he put one half-shell inside the other and laid them on a corner of the sink until he had a compact stack of twelve well-cleaned half-shells, which he carried to the garbage sack. All throughout, he’d felt her scorn at his wiping a finger around each shell instead of throwing it immediately away, as normal people do.
    “You wouldn’t believe how much egg white clings to the shell,” he said, to himself and not out loud. It wasn’t the time.
    “The coffee is delicious!” he exclaimed, quietly, penitent. Dropped a knob of butter into the cast-iron and checked the amount of heat.
    She slipped her arms around him from behind, but she could not see the broad sunshine he smiled.
    “You know, the Brits eat baked beans with their eggs. What do you think about that?”
    “Yeah, that doesn’t appeal to me at all,” she answered. “But yet I have refried beans with an egg burrito or some huevos con chorizo, or just some pinto beans. They don’t have to be smashed. That’s weird, isn’t it? I’d never realized that before.”
    “I wish we had some peach bellinis now. I shoulda thought of that.”
    In a flash, she had found the number of the neighborhood supermarket, but it was still more than two hours out from noon on Sunday. Oh, well. Life was long and would overflow with such setbacks.
    “I’ve got beer,” he remembered.
    “Splendid!”
    “It’s not too early?”
    “Early? It’s October, dickhead!”
    “I like the way you live.”
    “Why did you bring up Brits?”
    “At first, I was like you. Baked beans for breakfast is too bizarre. But that’s one of those things that doesn’t leave you alone. The more I thought of those runny canned beans and those runny egg whites, you know, and I mean over the course of many years, well, I sorta realized that would make a mighty good combination, even for breakfast. Except for one thing. And I still haven’t ever tried them together.”
    “Except for what, my charming Baconfat Boy?”
    “The flatulence problem. It is delicate. As newlyweds, we are required still to conceal our more disgusting functions from each other for, at least, a good month or two, while yet knowing we fart and that such is love that it abides farts; nay, it welcomes them! Don’t you agree?”
    “As I said at the altar, I do. I herewith propose a brunch next Sunday of baked runny beans and stinky sardines and poorly executed fried eggs!”
    They clinked their cans.
    “And some stinky cheese?”
    “Stinky cheese, mi amor!”
    Oh, this is going to be even more fun than I had supposed. She likes to play rough. She has a hair trigger for anger. She acts well at liking me, and I’ll never know for sure. How long should I hide from her my obsession with Bob Dylan?

Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.